At roughly 1:00 pm, upon driving onto the base at Quantico, David House and blogger Jane Hamsher were detained by military guards. House, who is on the Quantico Brig’s visitation list, has been visiting Bradley Manning in confinement since last September.

In December 2010, House came forward with testimony that he witnessed a deterioration in Manning’s physical and mental state due to the conditions of solitary confinement. House traveled to the Quantico brig to check up on Bradley’s well-being after a week in which Manning’s lawyer filed an Article 138 complaint over Manning’s mistreatment at Quantico. House and Hamsher also planned to deliver a 42,000 signature strong petition calling for an end to the inhumane conditions that Manning is being held. Upon arriving at the main entrance at Quantico, House and Hamsher were stopped and detained by military police who provided no explanation of detainment aside from a statement from one MP that his orders to detain had “come from the top.”

Manning is incarcerated because of the word of Adrian Lamo. It’s obvious to everyone who’s looked closely at Lamo’s evidence and actions that he is a grossly unreliable witness who cannot be put on the witness stand; therefore, the DOD’s game plan seems to be to break Bradley Manning in the hope that he’ll tell them what they want to hear. However, breaking people in this fashion doesn’t provide truthful testimony, or even coherent lies. Instead, it just wrecks them in such a way that they can’t be put back together again.

I suppose it’s a sign of a sort of twisted progress that men’s sexual activity is (as least when politically helpful to the powers that be) questioned the way women’s sexual activity is and has always been questioned. Still, I would rather that nobody be slut-shamed in this day and age, particularly as a way from distracting from the issues at hand:

Assange was asked in a BBC interview questions such as “how many women have you slept with?” When Assange refused to answer, many WikiLeaks critics pointed to this as hypocrisy — oh, see, he doesn’t believe in transparency for himself — and my tweet pointed out the obvious fallacy of that claim: there is nothing inconsistent about demanding transparency for governments while insisting upon personal privacy.

Moreover, the question Assange refused to answer — “how many women have you slept with?” — is relevant to absolutely nothing of public interest, including the rape accusation. By stark contrast, the information Wired is concealing — whether Lamo is telling the truth about his various claims — goes to the heart of one of the most significant political controversies in the world.

If this had been about a Julia Assange who was just some random person and was accused of raping two of her lovers, you can bet there’d be a huge (and justly so!) hue and cry about how this was unfair to imply that the number of sexual encounters a person had somehow any bearing on their guilt or innocence of a particular crime. But since this is about a man who various people, including several prominent US politicians, want dead because he and his group released information that pulled back the curtain on how the powerful people operate (and more importantly showed them to be utter hypocrites), only someone like Glenn Greenwald notices, much less complains.

— So much for Republican outreach to the Latino community. A group of conservative Hispanic business leaders set up a forum, the first Hispanic Leadership Network conference scheduled for next month in Miami, and promoted it as a way for Republican presidential hopefuls to interact with the community — and virtually all the big names — Romney, Thune, Daniels, Perry — flatly turned them down, with a number of others not bothering to respond even in the negative to the invitation. The only potential candidate to accept the invitation was Tim Pawlenty, who has less of a chance than I do of becoming president — and I have a feeling he probably only agreed to come as a favor to Norm Coleman, who helped organize the thing.